CHENNAI 22/DEC/2014: With Uber on reverse gear following the Delhi rape incident, competitors Ola and TaxiFor-Sure are stepping up hiring to think up new vehicle categories for aggregation and mine deeper to understand the consumer better. Ola has made 143 job proposals to IIT graduates so far this placement season. IIT-Bombay is leading the pack with 46 offers, followed by IIT-Madras at 38.
Ola intends to make it up to 200 offers, which will take the total number of IITians placed in the Bengaluru- based company to 300. These graduates will be employed to test the validity of ideas including looking at new vehicles that can be aggregated to their app platforms. The young professionals will find out if the categories can be brought cost-effectively for the driver and the customer. They will also look at tackling the challenges to expand in tier II cities that may need changes in the app. With every taxi company facing demand peaks and fewer cab drivers by the day, creating car entrepreneurs by tying-up with auto-financiers is a separate vertical altogether.

\"The IIT hires will go into operations, technology and business development, and data sciences,\" said Anand Subramanian, who heads marketing communications at Ola.
With newer players driving in, tech-driven Ola, which raised $210 million (more than Rs 1,300 crore) from Japan\'s SoftBank this October, is looking at introducing new vehicles. Ola has 6,500 blackand-yellow cabs in Mumbai, and is currently piloting auto-rickshaw on its app in Bengaluru, Chennai, and Pune. The autos show up the same way as the cars on its app, and the drivers accept only cash as of now. There is no Ola signage on the vehicles.
Bengaluru-based TaxiFor-Sure recently got the Tata Nano on board, and the company\'s co-founder Raghunandan G told ET it will get into the auto-rickshaw segment soon. Ola is watching this space too. \"It\'s about newer categories. A mini is available at Rs 10 a km and we have the autorickshaw which has a fixed fare of Rs 25 for the first 2 km and Rs 12 for every additional kilometre. \"Definitely, there is a space in between to fill,\" said Subramanian, without elaborating further.

At TaxiForSure, IITians and MBA graduates from premier institutions work in an area that is academically at a cross-section of computer science and economics, said Amitava Ghosh, its chief technology officer. The company\'s big-data labs store data in Hadoop Clusters - a software that helps make sense of unstructured data - on several operational parameters, such as which part of the city offers maximum demand and peak demand periods in a day. Pairing this with vehicle-tracking software helps the company deploy cars in a way it cuts time for the customer and fuel for the driver. Declining to provide numbers, Ghosh said more IIT and IIM recruitments will take place this year.